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We happily make money without sacrificing our Open Source/Free Software principles. Does that bother you? (Disclaimer: Red Hatter since almost 15 years. I neve

We happily make money without sacrificing our Open Source/Free Software principles. Does that bother you? (Disclaimer: Red Hatter since almost 15 years. I never doubted for a second that we would open source what we buy. Ansible, 3Scale, CoreOS, we have a long history of sticking to our principles)

bryanlarsen 7y ago
I never doubted Red Hat, but I do doubt IBM. Glad to see that RedHat's principles are still alive.
tw04 7y ago
I hate to break it to you, you are no longer a red hatter, you are an ibm’er and at the mercy of their board of directors. You’ll remain open source right up until the moment they decide that’s not the best way to utilize their recent acquisition. I hope for all of us that doesn’t happen anytime soon, but IBM acquired Redhat, not the other way around... plenty of sun folks learned that the hard way.
- Doubleslash 7y ago
  I bet the same has been said about VMware, GitHub and LinkedIn. They are all still doing pretty well today, last I checked. And they weren't acquisitions that required the acquiring company to get investors in to close the deal.
  - oblio 7y ago
    The long history of corporate acquisitions disagrees with you. Those are outliers, not the norm.
- wademealing 7y ago
  I think that IBM know if they get their hands dirty in Red Hat, they wont have much ROI from their investment.
  - outside1234 7y ago
    I think you are a little too confident in IBM's management.
    - thawaway1837 7y ago
      Is there any reason to believe IBM hasn’t been a good open source citizen? Arguably a lot of OS progress that we are seeing today, especially in the enterprise, is a direct result of IBM’s decades old investments in tools like Eclipse, which was probably the first enterprise grade open source development software, but more importantly, by promoting OS in the enterprise in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when MS FUD about Linux was at an all time high.
      - mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Didn’t they also support Linux development before it was fashionable?
        ibotty 7y ago
        Yes, they did.
- sachinag 7y ago
  I'm new to IBM (last four months), but it's clear that everyone knows not to mess with what makes Red Hat special.
  - RickJWagner 7y ago
    Red Hatter here. I'm very glad to hear this! Thanks for saying it. P.S. I also agree with other people posting here. Red Hat is chock full of people who are absolutely looney about Open Source. It's at the heart of everything we do.
gsmith2 7y ago
Ansible was never Red Hat's to open source, the only open sourcing in that space is AWX, and it lacks release tags, working migrations or any meaningful community self-support that doesn't result in "you need to talk to us if you're doing this" on GitHub. It's a GPL'd code dump actively hostile to having a meaningful community develop around it
- freedomben 7y ago
  > the only open sourcing in that space is AWX AWX isn't a trivial or unimportant product. For deployments of scale it's very important. It would also have been very easy to hoard the code and not release it, so the fact that RH did is impressive to me. Having not tried to use open source AWX I'll take your word for the state of it. That saddens me greatly, and RH should do better. RH normally works pretty hard to avoid exactly that, but nobody is perfect (not making an excuse, just acknowledging failure). Have you tried to contribute to AWX and had a bad experience?
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  Not going to argue about any of your other points, but there are release tags at least; though they don't have any bearing on the releases downstream in Tower :(

bryanlarsen 7y ago

I never doubted Red Hat, but I do doubt IBM. Glad to see that RedHat's principles are still alive.

tw04 7y ago

I hate to break it to you, you are no longer a red hatter, you are an ibm’er and at the mercy of their board of directors. You’ll remain open source right up until the moment they decide that’s not the best way to utilize their recent acquisition. I hope for all of us that doesn’t happen anytime soon, but IBM acquired Redhat, not the other way around... plenty of sun folks learned that the hard way.

Doubleslash 7y ago
I bet the same has been said about VMware, GitHub and LinkedIn. They are all still doing pretty well today, last I checked. And they weren't acquisitions that required the acquiring company to get investors in to close the deal.
- oblio 7y ago
  The long history of corporate acquisitions disagrees with you. Those are outliers, not the norm.
wademealing 7y ago
I think that IBM know if they get their hands dirty in Red Hat, they wont have much ROI from their investment.
- outside1234 7y ago
  I think you are a little too confident in IBM's management.
  - thawaway1837 7y ago
    Is there any reason to believe IBM hasn’t been a good open source citizen? Arguably a lot of OS progress that we are seeing today, especially in the enterprise, is a direct result of IBM’s decades old investments in tools like Eclipse, which was probably the first enterprise grade open source development software, but more importantly, by promoting OS in the enterprise in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when MS FUD about Linux was at an all time high.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Didn’t they also support Linux development before it was fashionable?
      - ibotty 7y ago
        Yes, they did.
sachinag 7y ago
I'm new to IBM (last four months), but it's clear that everyone knows not to mess with what makes Red Hat special.
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  Red Hatter here. I'm very glad to hear this! Thanks for saying it. P.S. I also agree with other people posting here. Red Hat is chock full of people who are absolutely looney about Open Source. It's at the heart of everything we do.

gsmith2 7y ago

Ansible was never Red Hat's to open source, the only open sourcing in that space is AWX, and it lacks release tags, working migrations or any meaningful community self-support that doesn't result in "you need to talk to us if you're doing this" on GitHub. It's a GPL'd code dump actively hostile to having a meaningful community develop around it

freedomben 7y ago
> the only open sourcing in that space is AWX AWX isn't a trivial or unimportant product. For deployments of scale it's very important. It would also have been very easy to hoard the code and not release it, so the fact that RH did is impressive to me. Having not tried to use open source AWX I'll take your word for the state of it. That saddens me greatly, and RH should do better. RH normally works pretty hard to avoid exactly that, but nobody is perfect (not making an excuse, just acknowledging failure). Have you tried to contribute to AWX and had a bad experience?
geerlingguy 7y ago
Not going to argue about any of your other points, but there are release tags at least; though they don't have any bearing on the releases downstream in Tower :(